“Ellie?” he said, his hands still around my waist.
“Yeah?”
“I’m gonna kiss you now.”
“As your real girlfriend?”
He grinned. “Hell yeah.”
Then, he kissed me, and it was everything. Honest and messy. Soaked in rain and long overdue. But it was ours. Finally, truly, completely ours.
We stayed like that for a while, grinning like idiots, forehead to forehead, letting the rain do whatever it wanted. Then, Sawyer reached back and pulled out something from his wallet.
I squinted at it. “Is that?—?”
He held it up between us. “The contract.”
Sure enough, it was the stupid napkin we’d scribbled on the day everything started, half-smudged now, a greasy coffee ring bleeding through the corner.
“You’ve had that in your wallet this whole time?” I asked.
“Obviously. I take all legally binding agreements very seriously.” He looked down at it for a second nostalgically and ripped it clean down the middle. “Contract terminated.”
I grinned. “Good.”
He tucked the torn halves into his pocket and looked back at me. “I think we should renegotiate.”
I tilted my head. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. New terms. Real dating. Equal partnership. No end date. And you still owe me that dinner date you paid twenty grand for.”
I leaned up to kiss him again. “Deal.”
FIFTY-TWO
Sawyer
A coupleof weeks after everything came out—Ben being the real father, Lauren killing her son, and the discovery that my house had been a murder scene for years—there was still fallout.
But all of that was behind us now.
Ellie was preparing for her final concert. The last one on her tour. The last one…probably for a while.
She didn’t call it a retirement. Maybe she’d perform again someday, she’d said—maybe in a smaller venue, maybe at a festival if the mood struck—but definitely not like this. Not with a tour bus and stylists and people shouting in her ear every hour of the day.
She wanted something quieter, and tonight, she was getting her goodbye.
I watched from the VIP tent with her parents by my side, just like I had a few months ago.
Tonight felt different. The energy was heavier. Electric.
Final.
The whole arena was going nuts, fans screaming her name, glitter signs bobbing above their heads. They were chanting for her before the countdown started. The floor vibrated beneathmy feet. Then the platform rose, the spotlight hit her, and the moment the music dropped, the place went feral.
Fans screamed like crazy. Everyone stood. Phones shot up. The opening chords blasted through the sound system. Ellie came up from beneath the floor into the spotlight like she was born for it.
The moment she started to sing, the crowd joined in, thousands of people shouting every word back to her like they belonged to them too.
